


How It Hurts To Forget

by DefinitelyNotStraight



Category: The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Flashbacks, Gen, Hugs, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Poisoning, Protective Siblings, Self-Harm, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, Temporary Character Death, Touch-Starved
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-18
Updated: 2020-09-18
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:08:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26527231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DefinitelyNotStraight/pseuds/DefinitelyNotStraight
Summary: Nastya is alone. She is forgetting and she wants it to end.Problem is, she has a glitch, and that glitch is that she is immortal.But that doesn't stop her from trying.Otherwise known as Nastya is depressed, and the crew finally figure it out and then there is comfort.
Relationships: Jonny d'Ville & Nastya Rasputina, Nastya Rasputina & The Mechanisms
Comments: 3
Kudos: 34





	How It Hurts To Forget

**Author's Note:**

> Pretty heavy angst. I love Nastya with all my heart.   
> Yes, she and Jonny are siblings.   
> Idk man, be safe when you read this. I got the poisoning from a novel so it's not accurate at all ngl.

Nastya is tired.   
No, she's exhausted.   
And she's so fucking done with all of this. With breathing, with being immortal. With having to wake up each time she sleeps, with her wounds stitching themselves back together every time someone shoots her or she takes a blade to her own wrists.  
It's been millennia now, and she wants it to end.   
She's alone.  
Well, no, she's not, but she feels like she is. She never was good at the whole bonding thing, even before Carmilla messed around with her insides and made her some sort of freak that just will not die. No matter how hard anyone tries.  
No matter how hard SHE tries.   
She can still feel pain, and that's a blessing, because physical pain will mend and distract her from the aching and longing in her heart that never goes away of how much she desperately wants to just rest.   
The crew would be better without her, she thinks. No freak who thinks she can date the ship, no one to undermine Jonny or disappear and make them all worry. No one always tinkering with that she shouldn't and arguing back.   
The rest of the crew bond, they love each other even while they scream and they fight and put bullets in one another.  
Nastya watches, and she is outside of it all.   
She longs, on the days where she just quite stop herself from dreaming about it, to be part of the crew. In more than just function, but to be able to be at ease with them. To sprawl across laps like Lyf does and to play fight and brawl like Tim and Jonny and Marius do.   
She listens, and they don't notice her in the background (don't notice her at all, ever, unless they want to yell at her or make fun of her for emotionally bonding to the ship), and she sheds tears she wasn't aware should hurt more than a blade or a live wire as she hears how easily they express their affections to each other.   
The "I love you's" that are there in sentiment, if not in phrase. In the way Jonny rolls his eyes and lifts Lyf into his arms when they fall asleep in stupid places, in the way Ashes and Ivy braid each other's hair and tug on the ends before ending up in a fight. In the way Tim teaches Marius to shoot and how they all play with Toy Soldier and how they allow Tim to keep the demonic octokittens aboard and they drag Drumbot to Nastya for repairs in the few times they seek her out when they aren't sticking their noses in where they shouldn't be and causing havoc.   
None of them tell her they love her. In words or sentiment.   
The only person who does is Aurora, and sometimes Nastya doubts if she does or if the returned affection is a glitch in her mainframe.   
Nastya feels alone, on this ship, but she is immortal, and eventually they will always run into one another again (immortals often do), so what would be the point in running away at all?  
She loves them, she really, truly does. She loves them more than she knew was possible for someone who isn't even human anymore. She tries to tell them, but then words stick on her tongue. In English, in Russian, in every language her throat knows how to pronounce, but they stick like glue and she chokes on them, and they tell her off for wasting their time. 

She's in her living pod, while they all do whatever it is that is making them all so happy across the ship, and she has turned off Aurora's sensors in her space.   
She sits, staring into the cosmos, listening to the laughter that taunts her because it never includes her, and to the bubbling of the lab before her.   
Jonny doesn't know about the lab in her quarters, none of them have ever visited her, but she doubts he would find it interesting.   
She got this idea from reading an ancient Earth book, by an author called Agatha Christie. The idea of poisons is not new to her, she has been poisoned before, but not for millennia. Not since Carmilla was testing the limits of the invulnerable thing she had created out of what was once Nastya but she isn't sure is anymore. But it was never old Earth poisons.  
While she is sure that they won't work, nothing else has, they seem like a good way to occupy herself.   
After all, bullets and blades and live wires got old as methods of harming herself after a while. Some internal damage and slow release poison would be different.   
She's calling it an experiment, rather than admitting her absolutely fucked mental state.   
She takes one of the bubbling vials, distilled poison from fruits (from the seeds and pits, in this one from cherries, and she added the flavouring of the fruit to it, just to give herself a laugh to a joke she only has with herself), and she drains it like a shot.   
It tastes good, a little bitter, but she always had liked cherries, even as a child, which is one of the only things she remembers of being a child anymore.   
That's what being immortal is. It's not never dying, it's losing parts of yourself until you wish with all your might that you could die.   
She wishes she could have stayed dead, like mama and papa and Alyosha are. Like her brother Alexei, and her sisters Tatiana and Maria.   
She bites through her fist when she remembers that she can't remember the colour of her mama's hair or the shade of Alyosha's eyes. She can't remember Maria's favourite song or Tatiana's least favourite food and she can't remember Alexei at all except how he looked when he was bleeding out from his illness. She is forgetting and she swore she never would and the taste of cherry mixes with the taste of her mercury blood and she hates how much she finds comfortable familiarity in the taste of her own putrid blood.   
Oh.  
Oh, she feels weird. Her limbs feel weaker and her head hurts. Was she confused before?  
Well, she is now.   
Her chest is tight, so so tight.   
She hates this, it hurts.   
God, it fucking hurts.   
Was it supposed to kick in this fast? Oh, yeah, she had adjusted the dose. She had tripled the fatal dose for a normal human, and then some.   
She was going to die soon.  
Ouch, she hit the floor with a heavy bang. It echoed around the ship, Nastya was heavier than others because of her mercury blood, and for a moment she feared the others would come looking for her. Concerned about the noise.   
She choked out a laugh on lungs that were failing.   
Yeah, right, as if they would care. Even if she did die, if that were even possible, they would be relieved. No more silly, awkward Nastya to get in their way and mess about with their ship.   
Her lungs hurt and she tried to breathe even while she knew her lungs were shutting down.   
Suddenly, euphoria hit her, and she knew it was her brain high on oxygen deprivation but she wasn't going to complain when for once she didn't feel so fucking sad.  
"Nastya...hey there, princess." She could hear Alyosha, and she wept when the voice of her friend so very long dead joined that of her mama and her sisters and her darling brother.  
Alyosha's eyes were green, her mama's locks were red like the sunset, and Alexei was tall and lanky and awkward and he was her brother.   
Her heart stopped, and she had never felt so peaceful.   
She wished, with the last second of her brain power, that this would last.   
\------------------  
"Where's Nastya?" Jonny asked the ship, and Aurora paused.  
"I do not know." She replied after a hesitant moment. Jonny exchanged confused looks with Tim and Drumbot, who needed maintenance.   
Aurora knew everything on the ship, where they all were at every second of the day.   
"What do you mean? She hasn't left again, has she?" Drumbot asked, and Aurora confirmed that Nastya was still on the ship.   
"My sensors are being blocked from scanning her quarters." Aurora told them, and Tim could hear how worried and upset the ship was by that. He went to controls and unlocked the commands set by their resident princess.  
"She is not conscious." Aurora told them, and Jonny felt something dreadful rise in his stomach up to his heart.   
Something wasn't right.   
He tapped the comms and told the crew to meet him at Nastya's living pod, before moving with Tim and Brian to get there himself.  
He overloaded the door lock, and he entered to see Nastya on the floor. He rushed to her, checking her pulse even though he knew it was impossible for her to be dead for long.   
It was weak, and he cradled Nastya in his arms as the others entered, and they were all struck with the knowledge that this was the first time any of them had ever actually visited Nastya's home on the ship.   
The lab bubbled and notes and journals were open everywhere, and Jonny felt even worse than before when he wiped silver tinted tears from pale cheeks.   
"Jonny, come and read this." Lyf sounded shaky, and he didn't like that, easing the Russian to the ground again to go look at what they had found.   
He vomited into the trash can.   
He read over pages and pages of research into the effects of blades and electric shocks on the body, and how it compares to the reactions of someone with mercury blood. There were pain scales and recovery rates, and one journal was obviously Nastya's private one but he couldn't stop reading now.  
It detailed how she desperately wished to die, so the crew could be happier, so Aurora would function better, so she couldn't lose any more of her memories than she was.   
How she loved to hurt herself because she seemed to be hurting them. How alone she felt when she watched them and they never ever looked at her.   
Oh, fuck.  
They had really, really fucked up here.   
Because they thought that Nastya values being alone, that her awkwardness around them was just how she was and they were giving her distance like she wanted. They had never judged a situation more poorly than they had when judging Nastya's.   
"Oh, love." Ivy had Nastya in her arms now, lifting her up and laying her on the bed to the far side of the space, and they moved to look around more, seeing pictures of themselves lining the walls along with aged pictures that must be Nastya's family.   
Jonny had done this. He had done this to his little sister and he did not have the fucking foggiest how to fix it.   
Nastya was his sibling, of course she was, they were together when Carmilla decided to toy around their their insides and restart their hearts with the intention of never letting them stop again. Nastya did not know that he felt that.   
"Jonny." Tim called, and he left to see another journal, filled to the brim with gift ideas and memories and profiles of each of them. What they love and dislike, things that upset them, how they express emotions and love. It was written clinically, like it was by an outsider, which he realised that is what they had made out of Nastya in their efforts not to make her uncomfortable with their rowdy natures. 

Jonny D'Ville doesn't give up. Neither does his crew, and they were going to fix the mess they had made of their princess.  
\------------  
Nastya woke up.   
A shame, she thought. But then her sensory awareness caught up to her and she realised that she was pressed into something firm and warm and it smelt like gunpowder ahd whiskey.   
Tim.  
She shot up, begging forgiveness and trying to shoot away, but strong arms tugged her heavy body back against the chest, and she quieted down.   
Clearly, she was still hallucinating. She hadn't seen any notations of that being a cyanide side effect for those who recovered.   
"You're not hallucinating, princess." That was Ashes' voice.   
Okay, no, she had to be hallucinating. Maybe the floor was was overheating and that's why she was warm and against something solid.   
"Oi. Don't be a dumbass. You're not hallucinating." Tim told her, tapping the top of her head gently, and she rubbed her eyes before blinking up at them.   
What, and she cannot stress this enough, the fuck is happening?  
Because she's in the common room, surrounded by the crew, cuddled in the centre of the softest pillow cuddle pile, with her body resting on Tim, with Jonny spooned against her back and Ashes playing with her hair above her. Lyr was with her, braiding bits of it like his own platinum hair was braided beautifully.   
"This has to be a delusion. I'm never wanted here. The crew doesn't want me." She murmurs to herself, and she hears the sighs leaving those around her.   
"Sestra, can you turn to face me?" That was Jonny, and she turned before she even process that he had called her his sister.   
She looked up at her Captain, and she wasn't prepared for his teary eyes. Protectiveness surged in her and she clenched her fists in his belts.   
"Who hurt you?" She hissed. She wasn't the most violent of them, but she was loyal and even if they didn't love her, she loved them.   
"No one. But we hurt you, and that's even worse. Nastya, I'm so sorry we made you feel alone. We thought you didn't want this, we thought it would scare you to join the cuddle piles, you were so touch adverse when you got here and we thought you wanted to be distant until you were ready and that was okay. Then you never sought us out and we were okay with that because we wanted you to feel safe and at home here. We didn't know then that you didn't know how to act with touch, and that you didn't know how to initiate it. So we let you wallow and become more and more depressed and touch starved and believe that we didn't want you because we thought you were happier with the distance. And we were wrong and we should never have let it get this far and we are so fucking sorry, Nastya." He is begging forgiveness and Nastya is sobbing again and all she can do is nod and bury her face into his chest and try to force herself into his actual heart. The pressure is amazing and her body is singing because when the fuck was the last time someone held her?  
Before Carmilla toyed with her insides. Before she watched who was meant to be her mentor murder Alyosha before her eyes.   
God, she misses them.   
It's a while before she can speak again, before she let's Jonny move more than an inch away, before she can bear to look them in the eyes.   
"My turn next, princess." She's lifted back to Tim, who has a mischievous grin that is matched by Brian, Marius and Lyf before at least four sets of hands are scrabbling at her sides and her stomach and making her squeal with laughter.   
She didn't even know she was still ticklish, but she is, and she is writhing in their grasps and giggling like a child again before they stop and she is engulfed into their arms, her body on top of Tim.  
"Am I too heavy?" She asked awkwardly, and Tim shakes his head. She doesn't know if he's lying or not, because mercury has a different gravitational level than blood so she's considerably heavier than a human being is.   
She decides to trust his word though, and she lays there, warmer than she has been since before she died.   
"Nastya, please. Please stop hurting yourself." Lyf speaks up from where they are nuzzling like a cat into her neck, and she flushes red with shame and anxiety.   
"You know about that, huh?" She mumbled, and they nod again. Her crew make noises of agreement, and she sighs.  
"Its hard. I was alone, and I was forgetting. I couldn't remember my mama's smile or my sister's voice, and the only memories I had left of Alyosha and Alexei is how they looked when they bled out in front of me. The pain was easier to cope with, and trying to die meant I got at least some rest as my body restricted itself together." She explained, and Ivy made an aborted whimper noise in her throat before she dived onto Nastya and held her tight.   
"You're not alone, and we're so sorry we made you think you were. We're here, if you need to talk. I promise, Nastya, I promise. No more experiments and no more dying, just talk to us." Ashes growled out in her way of being gentle, resting her forehead against the tsarina's.   
"I'll try." Nastya promised, and Jonny kissed her cheek.  
"That's all we ask, sestra." He tells her, and one by one, her crew curl around her like the world's most in-need-of-therapy blanket.   
She begins to fall asleep, exhausted from dying, healing, crying and her general mental state, and she hears Marius sing.   
The lullaby her mother sang to her, the russian butchered on his tongue but she is so grateful for it that she might cry again.   
She falls asleep to memories of her mother, and here, in the arms of those she loves and those who actually do love her, she does not forget at all.


End file.
